No More Learning

For the sake of brevity, Ulrich had, in these examples, telescoped the overflowing and desiccating forms oflosing oneself, and not unjustly so, for if from another point of view the distinction is indeed a quite significant one, yet in consideration of the ultimate manifestations, the two forms come close to merging. The orgiastically enraptured person leaps to his ruin as into a light, and tearing or being tom to pieces are for him blazing acts of love and deeds of freedom in the same way that, for all the differences, the person who is deeply exhausted and embittered allows himself to fall to his catastrophe, receiving salvation in this final act; in other words, he too receives something that is sweetened by freedom and love. Thus action and suffering blend on the highest plane on which they can still be experienced.
But this ecstasy of undivided sovereignty and of the crisis of an emotion are, of course, to a greater or lesser degree merely mental constructs, and true ecstasies-whether mystical, martial, or those of love groups or other transported communities-always presuppose a cluster of interrelated emotions and arise from a circle of ideas that reflects them. In less consolidated form, occasionally rigidifying and occasionally loosening up again, such unreal images of the world, formed in the sense of being particular groupings of ideas and feel- ings (as Weltanschauung, as personal tic), are so frequent in every- day life that most of them are not even regarded as ecstasies, although they are the preliminary stage of ecstasies in about the same way that a safety match in its box signifies the preliminary stage of a burning match. In his last entry, Ulrich had noted that a picture of the world whose nature is ecstatic also arises whenever the emo- tions and their subservient ideas are simply given priority over sobri- ety and reflection: it is the rapturous, emotional picture of the world, ecstatic life, that is periodically encountered in literature and to
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 2 99
some extent also in reality, in larger or smaller social communes; but what was missing in this enumeration was precisely what for Ulrich was most important, the adducing of the one and only condition of soul and world which he considered an ecstasy that would be a wor- thy coequal of reality. But his thoughts now digressed from the sub- ject, for if he wanted to make up his mind about evaluating this most seductive of exceptions, it was absolutely necessary-and this was also brought home to him in that he had hesitatingly alternated be- tween an ecstatic world and a mere picture of an ecstatic world-to first become acquainted with the link that exists between our emo- tions and what is real: that is to say, the world to which we, as op- posed to the illusions of ecstasy, impart this value.
But the standards by which we measure this world are those of the understanding, and the conditions under which this happens are likewise those of the understanding. But understanding~ven ifin- creasingly greater discrimination of its limits and rights places great obstacles in the path of the intellect-possesses a peculiarity in spe- cific relation to the emotions that is easily perceived and character- ized: in order to understand, we must put aside our emotions to the greatest extent possible. We block them out in order to be "objec- tive," or we place ourselves in a state in which the abiding emotions neutralize each other, or we abandon ourselves to a group of cool feelings that, handled carefully, are themselves conducive to under- standing. We draw upon what we apprehend in this clearheaded condition for comparison when in other cases we speak of "delu- sions" through the emotions; and then we have a zero condition, a neutralized state: in short, a specific situation of the emotions, the silent presupposition of experience and thought processes with whose aid we consider merely as subjective whatever other emo- tional states used to delude us. A millennium's experience has con- firmed that we are most qualified to consistently satisfy reality ifwe place ourselves in this condition again and again, and that whoever wants not merely to understand but also to act also has need of this condition. Not even a boxer can do without objectivity, which in his case means "staying cool," and inside the ropes he can as little afford to be angry as he can to lose his courage if he does not want to come out the loser. So our emotional attitude too, if it is to be adapted to reality, does not depend solely on the emotions governing us at the
1300 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
moment or on their submerged instinctual levels, but depends simul- taneously on the enduring and recurrent emotional state that guar- antees an understanding of reality and is usually as little visible as the air within which we breathe.
This personal discovery of a connection that is usually not often taken into account had enticed Ulrich to thinking further about the relation of the emotions to reality. Here a distinction must be made between the sense perceptions and the emotions. The fanner also "deceive," and clearly neither the sensuous image of the world that sense perceptions represent to us is the reality itself, nor is the men- tal image we infer from it independent ofthe human way ofthinking, though it is independent of the subjective way of thinking. But al- though there is no tangible similarity between reality and even the most exact representation of it that we have-indeed, there is, rather, an unbridgeable abyss of dissimilarity-and though we never get to see the original, yet we are able in some complex way to decide whether and under what conditions this image is correct. It is differ- ent with the emotions: for these present even the image falsely, to maintain the metaphor, and yet in so doing fulfill just as adequately the task of keeping us in harmony with reality, except that they do it in a different way. Perhaps this challenge of remaining in harmony with reality had a particular attraction for Ulrich, but aside from that, it is also the characteristic sign of everything that asserts itself in life; and there can thus be derived from it an excellent shorthand fonnula and demonstration ofwhether the image that perception and reason give us of something is correct and true, even though this fonnula is not all-inclusive. We require that the consequences of the mental picture of reality we have constructed agree with the ideational image of the consequences that actually ensue in reality, and only then do we consider the understanding's image to be correct. In con- trast to this, it can be said of the emotions that they have taken over the task of keeping us constantly in errors that constantly cancel one another out.
And yet this is only the consequence of a division oflabor in which the emotion that is served by the tools of the senses, and the thought processes that are heavily influenced by this emotion, develop and, briefly stated, have developed into sources of understanding, while the realm of the emotions themselves has been relegated to the role
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 3 0 1
of more or less blind instigator; for in primeval times, our emotions as well as our sense sensations sprang from the same root, an attitude that involved the entire creature when it carne into contact with a stimulus. The division of labor that arose later can even now be ex- pressed by the statement that the emotions do without understand- ing what we would do with understanding if we were ever to do anything without some instigation other than understanding! If one could only project an image of this feeling attitude, it would have to be this: we assume about the emotions that they color the correct picture of the world and distort and falsely represent it. Science as well as everyday attitudes number the emotions among the "subjec- tivities"; they assume that these attitudes merely alter "the world we see," for they presume that an emotion dissipates after a short time and that the changes it has caused in a perception of the world will disappear, so that "reality" will, over a shorter or longer time, "reas- sert" itself.
It seemed to Ulrich quite remarkable that this sometimes para- lyzed condition of the emotions, which forms the basis of both scientific investigation and everyday behavior, has a subsidiary coun- terpoint in that the canceling of emotions is also encountered as a characteristic of earthly life. For the influence our emotions exercise on the mind's impartial representations, those things that maintain their validity as being true and indispensable, cancels itself out more or less completely over a long enough period of time, as well as over the breadth of matter that gets piled up; and the influence of the emotions on the mind's non-impartial representations, on those un- steady ideas and ideologies, thoughts, views, and mental attitudes born out ofchangeable emotions, which dominate historical life both sequentially and in juxtaposition, also cancels itself out, even if it does so in opposition to certainty, even ifit cancels itselfout to worse than nothing, to contingency, to impotent disorder and vacillation- in short, to what Ulrich exasperatedly called the "business of the emotions. "
Now that he read it again, he would have liked to work out this point more precisely but couldn't, because the written train of thought that ended here, trailing off in a few further catchwords, re- quired that he bring more important things to a conclusion. Forifwe project the intellectual image of the world, the one that corresponds
1302 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
to reality (even if it is always just an image, it is the right image), on the assumption of a specific state of the emotions, the question arises of what would happen if we were to be just as effectively controlled not by it but by other emotional states. That this question is not en- tirely nonsensical can be seen in that every strong affect distorts our image of the world in its own way, and a deeply melancholy person, or one who is constitutionally cheerful, could object to the "fancies" of a neutral and evenhanded person, saying that it is not so much because of their blood that they are gloomy or cheerful as on account of their experiences in a world that is full of heavy gloom or heavenly frivolity. And so, however an image of the world may be imagined based on the predominance of an emotion or a group of emotions, including for instance the orgiastic, it can also be based on bringing emotions in general to the fore, as in the ecstatic and emotional frame of mind of an individual or a community; it is a normal every- day experience that the world is depicted differently on the basis of specific groups of ideas and that life is lived in different ways up to the point of obvious insanity.
Ulrich was not in the least minded to consider that understanding was an error, or the world an illusion, and yet it seemed to him ad- missible to speak not only of an altered picture of the world but also of~otherworld, ifinstead ofthe tangible emotion that serves adap- tation to the world some other emotion predominates. This other world would be "unreal" in the sense that it would be deprived of almost all objectivity: it would contain no ideas, computations, deci- sions, and actions that were adapted to nature, and dissension among people would perhaps fail to appear for quite some time but, once present, would be almost impossible to heal. Ultimately, however, that would differ from our world only in degree, and about that pos- sibility only the question can decide whether a humanity living under such conditions would still be capable of carrying on with its life, and whether it could achieve a certain stability in the coming and going of attacks from the outer world and in its own behavior. And there are many things that can be imagined as subtracted from reality or replaced by other things, without people being unable to live in a world so constituted. Many things are capable of reality and the world that do not occur in a particular reality or world.
Ulrich was not exactly satisfied with this after he had written it
From the Posthumous Papers · 1303
down, for he did not want it to appear as if all these possible realities were equally justifi. ed. He stood up and paced back and forth in his study. Something was still missing, some kind of distinction between "reality" and "full reality," or the distinction between "reality for someone" and "real reality," or in other terms, an exposition of the distinctions of rank was missing between the claim to the validity of reality and world, and a motivation for our claiming a priority depen- dent on conditions impossible to fulfill for what seems to us to be real and true under all conditions, a priority that is true only under cer- tain conditions. For on the one hand an animal, too, adapts splen- didly to the world, and because it certainly does not do so in complete darkness of soul, there must be even in the animal some- thing that corresponds to human ideas ofworld and reality without it having to be, on that account, even remotely similar; and on the other hand we don't possess true reality but can merely refine our ideas about it in an infinite, ongoing process, while in the hurly-burly of life we even use juxtaposed ideas of quite varying degrees of pro- fundity, such as Ulrich himself had encountered in the course of this vexy hour in the example of a table and a lovely woman. But after having thought it over in approximately this fashion, Ulrich was rid of his restlessness and decided that it was enough; for what might still be said about this subject was not reserved for him, and not for this hour, either. He merely convinced himself once more that there was presumably nothing in his formulation that would be expected to im- pede a more precise exposition, and for honor's sake he wrote a few words to indicate what was missing.
And when he had done this he completely interrupted his activity, looked out the window into the garden lying there in the late-after- noon light, and even went down for a while in order to expose his head to the fresh air. He was almost afraid that he could now assert either too much or too little; for what was still waiting to be written down by him seemed to him more important than anything else.
1304
ULRICH AND THE TWO WORLDS OF EMOTION
"Where would be the best place to begin? " Ulrich asked himself as he wandered around the garden, the sun burning his face and hands in one place, and the shadow of cooling leaves falling on them in an- other. "Should I begin right away with every emotion existing in the world in binary fashion and bearing within itself the origin of two worlds as different from each other as day and night? Or would I do better to mention the significance that sobered feeling has for our image of the world, and then come conversely to the influence that the image of the world born from our actions and knowledge exer- cises on the picture ofour emotions that we create for ourselves? Or should I say that there have already been states of ecstasy, which I have sketchily described as worlds in which emotions do not mutu- ally cancel each other out? '' But even while he was asking himself these questions, he had already made up his mind to begin with ev- erything at the same time; for the thought that made him so anxious that he had interrupted his writing had as many associations as an old friendship, and there was no longer any way of saying how or when it had arisen. While he was trying to put things in order, Ulrich had moved closer and closer to this thought-and it was only on his own account that he had taken it up-but now that he had come to the end, either clarity or emptiness would have to emerge behind the dispersing mists. The moment when he found the first decisive words was not a pleasant one: "In every feeling there are two funda- mentally opposed possibilities for development, which usually fuse into one; but they can also come into play individually, and that chiefly happens in a state of ecstasy! "
He proposed to call them, for the time being, the outer and the inner development, and to consider them from the most harmless side. He had a crowd of examples at his disposal: liking, love, anger,· mistrust, generosity, disgust, envy, despair, fear, desire . . . , and he mentally ordered them into a series. Then he set up a second series:
From the Posthumous Papers · 1305
affability, tenderness, irritation, suspicion, high-spiritedness, anxiety, and longing, lacking only those links for which he could not Bnd any name, and then he compared the two series. One contained specific emotions, chiefly as they are aroused in us by a specific encounter; the second contained nonspecific emotions, which are strongest when aroused by some unknown cause. And yet in both cases it was the same emotions, in one case in a general, in the other in a specific state. "So I would say," Ulrich thought, "that in evexy emotion there is a distinction to be made between a development toward specificity and a development toward nonspecificity. But before doing that, it would first be better to list all the distinctions this involves. "
He could have toted up most of them in his sleep, but they will seem familiar to anyone who substitutes the word "moods" for the "nonspecific emotions" from which Ulrich had formed his second se- ries, although Ulrich deliberately avoided this term. Forifone makes a distinction between emotion and mood, it is readily apparent that the "specific emotion" is always directed toward something, origi- nates in a life situation, has a goal, and expresses itself in more or less straightforward behavior, while a mood demonstrates approximately the opposite of all these things: it is encompassing, aimless, widely dispersed, and idle, and no matter how clear it may be, it contains something indeterminate and stands ready to engulf any object with- out anything happening and without itself changing in the process. So a specific attitude toward something corresponds to the specific emotion, and a general attitude toward everything corresponds to the nonspecific emotion: the one draws us into action, while the other merely allows us to participate from behind a colorful window.
For a moment Ulrich dwelt on this distinction between how specific and nonspecific emotions relate to the world. He said to himself: "I will add this: Whenever an emotion develops toward specificity, it focuses itself, so to speak, it constricts its purposiveness, and it finally ends up both internally and externally in something of a blind alley; it leads to an action or a resolve, and even if it should not cease to exist in one or the other, it continues on, as changed as water leaving a mill. If, on the other hand, it develops toward non- specificity, it apparently has no energy at all. But while the specifi- cally developed emotion is reminiscent of a creature with grasping arms, the nonspecific emotion changes the world in the same way the
1306 • THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
sky changes its colors, without desire or self, and in this fonn objects and actions change like the clouds. The attitude of the nonspecific emotion to the world has in it something magical and-God help me! -in comparison to the specific attitude, something feminine! " This is what Ulrich said to himself, and then something occurred to him that took him far afield: for of course it is chiefly the develop- ment toward a specific emotion that brings with it the fragility and instability of the life of the soul. That the moment of feeling can never be sustained, that emotions wilt more quickly than flowers, or transform themselves into paper flowers if one tries to preserve them, that happiness and will, art and conviction, pass away: all this depends on the specificity of the emotion, which always imposes on it a purposiveness and forces it into the pace of life that dissolves or changes it. On the other hand, the emotion that persists in its non- specificity and boundlessness is relatively impervious to change. A comparison occurred to him: "The one dies like an individual, the other lasts like a kind or species. " In this arrangement of the emo- tions there is perhaps repeated in reality, even if very indirectly, a general arrangement oflife; he was not able to gauge this but did not stop over it, for he thought he saw the main argument more clearly than he ever had before.
He was now ready to return to his study, but he waited, because he wanted to mull over the entire plan in his head before putting it down on paper. "I spoke of two possibilities of development and two states of one and the same emotion," he reflected, "but then there must also be present at the origin of the emotion, of course, some- thing to initiate the process. And the drives that feed our soul with a life that is still close to animal blood actually demonstrate this bipar- tite disposition. A drive incites to action, and this appears to be its major task; but it also tunes the soul. If the drive has not yet found a target, its nebulous expanding and stretching become quite appar- ent; indeed, there will be many people who see precisely this as the sign of an awakening drive-for example, the sex drive-but of course there is a longing of hunger and other drives. So the specific and the nonspecific are present in the drive. I'll add," Ulrich thought, "that the bodily organs that are involved when the external world arouses an affect in us can on other occasions produce this af-
From the Posthunwus Papers · 1307
feet themselves i f they receive a stimulus from within; and that's all it takes to arrive at a state of ecstasy! "
Then he reflected that according to the results of research, and especially after his discussion ofthese results in his diaries, it was also to be assumed that the impulse for one emotion can always serve for another emotion, too, and that no emotion, in the process ofits shap- ing and strengthening, ever comes to an entirely specifiable end. But if that was true, then not only would no emotion ever attain its total specificity, but in all probability it would not attain perfect non- specificity either, and there was neither an entirely specific nor an entirely nonspecific emotion. And in truth it almost always happens that both possibilities combine in a common reality, in which merely the characteristics of one or the other predominate. There is no "mood" that does not also include specific emotions that form and dissolve again; and there is no specific emotion that, at least where it can be said to "radiate," "seize," "operate out of itself," "extend it- self," or operate on the world "directly," without an external emo- tion, does not allow the characteristics of the nonspecific emotion to peer through. There are certainly, however, emotions that closely approximate the one or the other.
Of course the terms "specific" and "nonspecific" involve the disadvantage that even a specific emotion is always insufficiently specified and is in this sense nonspecific; but that should probably be easy to distinguish from significant nonspecificity. "So all that re- mains is to settle why the particularity of the nonspecific emotion, and the whole development leading up to it, is taken to be less real than its counterpart," Ulrich thought. "Nature contains both. So the different ways they are treated are probably connected with the ex- ternal development ofemotion being more important for us than the inner development, or with the direction ofspecificity meaning more to us than that of nonspecificity. If this were not so, our life would truly have to be a different one than it is! It is an inescapable pecu- liarity of European culture that every minute the 'inner world' is pro- claimed the best and most profound thing life has to offer, without regard for the fact that this inner world is treated as merely an annex of the outer world. And how this is done is frankly the secret balance sheet of this culture, even though it is an open secret: the external
1308 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
world and the "personality" are set off against each other. The as- sumption is that the outer world stimulates in a person inner pro- cesses that must enable that person to respond in an appropriate fashion; and by mentally setting up this pathway leading from a change in the world through the change in a person to a further change in the world, one derives the peculiar ambiguity that permits us to honor the internal world as the true sphere of human grandeur and yet to presuppose that everything taking place within it has the ultimate task of flowing outward in the form of an orderly external action. "
The thought went through Ulrich's mind that it would be reward- ing to consider our civilization's attitude toward religion and culture in this sense, but it seemed to him more important to keep to the direction his thoughts had been following. Instead of "inner world," one could simply say"emotions," for they in particular are in the am- biguous position of actually being this inwardness and yet are mostly treated as a shadow of the world outside; and this of course was in- volved with everything that Ulrich thought he could distinguish as the inner and nonspeciflc development of emotions. This is already shown in that the expressions we use to describe inner governing processes are almost all derived from external processes; for we obvi- ously transpose the active kind ofexternal happening onto the differ- ently constituted inner events even in representing the latter as an activity, whether we call it an emanation, a switching on or off, a tak- ing hold, or something similar. For these images, derived from the outer world, have become accepted and current for the inner world only because we lack better ones to apprehend it. Even those scien- tific theories that describe the emotions as an interpenetration or juxtaposition on an equal footing of external and internal actions
make a concession to this custom, precisely because they ordinarily speak of acting and overlook pure inwardness's remoteness from act- ing. And for these reasons alone, it is simply inevitable that the inner development of emotions usually appears to us as a mere annex to their external development, appears indeed to be its repetition and muddying, distinguishing itself from the outer development through less sharply defined forms and hazier connections, and thus evoking the somewhat neglected impression of being an incidental action.
But of course what is at stake is not simply a form of expression or
From the Posthunwus Papers · 1309
a mental priority; what we "really" feel is itself dependent on reality in hundreds of ways and is therefore also dependent on the specific and external development of emotions to which the development of inner and nonspecific emotions subordinates itself, by which the lat- ter are, as it were, blotted up. "It shouldn't depend on the details," Ulrich resolved, "yet it could probably be shown in every detail not only that the concept we create for ourselves has the task of service- ably integrating its 'subjective' element into our ideas about reality, but also that in feeling itself, both dispositions merge in a holistic process that unites their outer and inner development in very un- equal fashion. Simply stated: we are acting beings; for our actions we need the security of thinking; therefore we also need emotions capa- ble of being neutralized-and our feeling has taken on its character- istic form in that we integrate it into our image of reality, and not the other way around, as ecstatics do. Just for that reason, however, we must have within us the possibility of turning our feeling around and experiencing our world differently! "
He was now impatient to write, feeling confident that these ideas had to be subjected to a more intense scrutiny. Once in his study, he turned on the light, as the walls already lay in shadow. Nothing was to be heard of Agathe. He hesitated an instant before beginning.
He was inhibited when he recollected that in his impatience to take shortcuts in laying out and sketching his idea he had used the concepts "inner" and "outer," as well as "individual" and "world," as if the distinction between both agencies-of-the emotions coincided with these representations. Tilis was of course not so. The peculiar distinction Ulrich had made between the disposition for and the pos- sibility of elaboration into specific and nonspecific emotions, if al- lowed to prevail, cuts across the other distinctions. The emotions develop in one and the other fashion just as much outwardly and in the world as they do inwardly and in the individual. He pondered over a proper word for this, for he didn't much like the terms "spe- cific" and "nonspecific," although they were indicative. "The original difference in experience is most exposed and yet most expressive in that there is an externalizing of emotions as well as an inwardness both internal and external," he reflected, and was content for a mo- ment, until he found these words, too, as unsatisfactory as all the oth- ers, when he went on to try out a dozen. But this did not change his
1310 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
conviction; it only looked to him like a complication in the discussion he was embarking on, the result oflanguage not having been created for this aspect of existence. "If I go over everything once more and find it correct, it won't matter to me ifall I end up talking about is our ordinary emotions and our 'other' ones," he concluded.
Smiling, he took down from a shelf a book that had a bookmark in it and wrote at the head of his own words these words of another: "Even if Heaven, like the world, is subjected to a series of changing events, still the Angels have neither concept nor conception of space and time. Although for them, too, everything that happens happens sequentially, in complete harmony with the world, they do not know what time means, because what prevails in Heaven are neither years nor days, but changing states. Where there are years and days, sea- sons prevail, where there are changes of state, conditions. Since the Angels have no conception of time the way people do, they have no way of specifying time; they do not even know of its division into years, months, weeks, hours, into tomorrow, yesterday, and today. If they should hear a person speak ofthese things-and God has always linked Angels with people-what they understand by them is states and the determination of states. Man's thinking begins with time, the Angels' with a state; so what for human beings is a natural idea is for the Angels a spiritual one. All movement in the spiritual world is brought about through inner changes in state. When this troubled me, I was raised into the sphere of Heaven to the consciousness of Angels, and led by God through the realms of the firmament and conducted to the constellations of the universe, and all this in my mind, while my body remained in the same place. This is how all the Angels moved from place to place: that is why there are for them no intervals, and consequently no distances either, but only states and changes in state. Every approach is a similarity of inner states, every distancing a dissimilarity; spaces in Heaven are nothing but external states, which correspond to the internal ones. In the spiritual world, everyone will appear visible to the other as soon as he has a yearning desire for the other's presence, for then he is placing himself in the other's state; conversely, in the presence ofdisinclination he will dis- tance himself from him. In the same way, someone who changes his abode in halls or gardens gets where he is going more quickly if he longs for the place, and more slowly if his longing is less; with aston-
From the Posthurrwus Papers · I 3 I I
ishment I saw this happen often. And since the Angels are not able to conceive of time, they also have a different idea of eternity than earthly people do; they understand by it an infinite state, not an infi- nite time. "
A few days earlier, Ulrich had accidentally come across this in a selection of the writings of Swedenborg he owned but had never re- ally read; and he had condensed it a little and copied down so much of it because he found it very pleasant to hear this old metaphysician and learned engineer-who made no small impression on Goethe, and even on Kant-talking as confidently about heaven and the an- gels as if it were Stockholm and its inhabitants. It fit in so well with his own endeavor that the remaining differences, which were by no means insignificant, were brought into relief with uncanny clarity. It gave him great pleasure to seize on these differences and conjure forth in a new fashion from the more cautiously posited concepts of a later century the assertions--dryly unhallucinatory in their premature self-certainty, but with a whimsical effect nevertheless- of a seer.
And so he wrote down what he had thought.
ALTERNATE DRAFT VERSIONS
The following/our chapters, in correctedfair copy, are alternate ver- sions o f the preceding "galley" chapters. (Alternates 47 and 4J have been omitted because the first differs in only minor details from gal- ley chapter 57, and the second closely parallels galley chapter 4J. ) Musil was working on these during the last two years ofhis life, up to his sudden death on April15, 1942.
49
CONVERSA TIONS ON LOVE
Man, the speaking animal, is the only one that requires conversation even for his reproduction. And not only because he is always talking does he speak while that is going on too, but apparently his bliss in love is bound root and branch to his loquacity, and in so profoundly mysterious a fashion that it almost calls to mind those ancients ac- cording to whose philosophy god, man, and things arose from the "logos," by which they variously understood the Holy Ghost, reason, and speaking. Now not even psychoanalysis and sociology have had anything of consequence to say about this, although both these mod- em sciences might well compete with Catholicism in intervening in everything human. So one must construct one's own explanation, that in love, conversations play an almost greater role than anything else. Love is the most garrulous ofall emotions, and it consists largely of loquaciousness. If the person is young, these conversations that
From the Posthumous Papers · 13 13
encompass everything are part of the phenomenon of growing up; if he is mature, they form his peacock's fan, which, even though it con- sists only of quills, unfolds the more vibrantly the later it happens. The reason might lie in the awakening of contemplative thinking through the emotions of love, and in its enduring connection with them; but this would only be putting off the problem for the mo- ment, for even ifthe word "contemplation" is used almost as often as the word "love," it is not any clearer.
Whether, moreover, what bound Agathe and Ulrich together can be accused ofbeing love or not is not to be decided on these grounds, although they spoke with each other insatiably. What they spoke about, too, turned around love, always and somehow; that is true. But what is true of every emotion is true of love, that its ardor ex- pands more strongly in words the farther off action is; and what per- suaded brother and sister, after the initial violent and obscure emotional experiences that had gone before, to give themselves over to conversations, and what seemed to them at times like a magic spell, was above all not knowing how they could act. But the timidity before their own emotions that was involved in this, and their curious penetration inward to this emotion from its periphery, sometimes caused these conversations to come out sounding more superficial than the depth that underlay them.
so
DIFFICULTIES WHERE THEY ARE NOT LOOKED FOR
How do things stand with the example, as celebrated as it is happily experienced, oflove between two so-called people ofdifferent sexes? It is a special case of the commandment to love thy neighbor without knowing what kind of person he is; and a test of the relationship that exists between love and reality.
1314 • THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
People make of each other the dolls with which they have already played in dreaming of love.
And what the other thinks and really is has no influence on this at all?
As long as one loves the other, _and because one loves the other, everything is enchanting; but this is not true the other way around. Never has a woman loved a man because ofhis thoughts or opinions, or a man a woman on account of hers. These play only an important secondary role. Moreover, the same is true ofthoughts as ofanger: if one understands impartially what the other means, not only is anger disarmed, but most of the time, against its expectation, love as well.
But, especially at the beginning, isn't what plays the major role being charmed by the concord of opinions?
When the man hears the woman's voice, he hears himself being repeated by a marvelous submerged orchestra, and women are the most unconscious of ventriloquists; without its coming from their mouths, they hear themselves giving the cleverest answers. Each time it is like a small annunciation: a person emerges from the clouds at the side of another, and everything the one utters seems to the other a heavenly crown, custom fitted to his head! Later, of course, you feel like a drunk who has slept off his stupor.
And then the deeds! Are not the deeds of love-its loyalty, its sac- rifices and attentions-its most beautiful demonstration? But deeds, like all mute things, are ambiguous. Ifone thinks back on one's life as a dynamic chain of actions and events, it amounts to a play in which one has not noticed a single word of the dialogue and whose scenes have the same monotonous climaxes!
So one does not love according to merit and reward, and in anti- phony with the immortal spirits mortally in love?
That one is not loved as one deserves is the sorrow of all old maids ofboth sexes!
It was Agathe who gave this response. The uncannily beautiful where-does-it-come-from oflove rose up from past loves in conjunc- tion with the mild frenzy of injustice and even reconciled her to the lack of dignity and seriousness of which she sometimes complained because of her game with Professor Lindner, and which she was al- ways ashamed of whenever she again found herself in Ulrich's vicin- ity. But Ulrich had begun the conversation, and in the course of it
From the Posthumous Papers · 1315
had become interested in pumping her for her memories; for her way of judging these delights was similar to his.
She looked at him and laughed. "Haven't you ever loved a person above everything, and despised yourself for it? "
"I could say no; but I won't indignantly reject it out of hand," Ul- rich said. "It could have happened. "
"Have you never loved a person," Agathe went on excitedly, "de- spite the strangest conviction that this person, whether he has a beard or breasts, about whom you thought you knew everything and whom you esteem, and who talks incessantly about you and himself, is really only visiting love? You could leave out his thinking and his merits, give him a different destiny, furnish him with a different beard and different legs: you could almost leave him out, and you would still love him! . . . That is, insofar as you love him at all! " she added to soften it.
Her voice had a deep resonance, with a restless glitter in its depths, as from a fire. She sat down guiltily, because in her uninten- tional eagerness she had sprung up from her chair.
Ulrich, too, felt somewhat guilty on account of this conversation, and smiled. He had not in the least intended to speak of love as one of those contemporary bifurcated emotions that the latest trend calls "ambivalent," which amounts to saying that the soul, as is the case with swindlers, always winks with its left eye while pledging an oath with its right hand. He had only found it amusing that love, to arise and endure, does not depend on anything significant. That is, you love someone in spite of everything, and equally well on account of nothing; and that means either that the whole business is a fantasy or that this fantasy is the whole business, as the world is a whole in which no sparrow falls without the All-Feeling One being aware of it.
"So it doesn't depend on anything at all! " Agathe exclaimed by way ofconclusion. "Not on what a person is, not on what he thinks, not on what he wants, and not on what he does. "
It was clear to them that they were speaking of the security of the soul, or, since it might be well to avoid such a grand word, of the insecurity, which they-using the term now with modest imprecision and in an overall sense-felt in their souls. And that they were talk- ing of love, in the course of which they reminded each other of its changeability and its art of metamorphosis, happened only because it
1316 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
is one ofthe most violent and distinctive emotions, and yet it is such a suspicious emotion before the stem throne ofsovereign understand- ing that it causes even this understanding to waver. But here they had already found a beginning when they had scarcely begun stroll- ing in the sunshine of loving one's neighbor; and mindful of the as- sertion that even in this gracious stupefaction you had no idea whether you really loved people, and whether you were loving real people, or whether, and by means of what qualities, you were being duped by a fantasy and a transformation, Ulrich showed himself as- siduous in finding a verbal knot that would give him a handhold on the questionable relationship that exists between emotion and un- derstanding, at least at the present moment and in the spirit of the idle conversation that had just died away.
"This always contains both contradictions; they form a four-horse team," he said. "You love a person because you know him; and be- cause you don't know him. And you understand him because you love him; and don't know him because you love him. And sometimes this reaches such a pitch that it suddenly becomes quite palpable. These are the notorious moments when Venus through Apollo, and Apollo through Venus, gaze at a hollow scarecrow and are mightily amazed that previously they had seen something else there.
Iflove is stronger than this astonishment, a struggle arises between them, and sometimes love-albeit exhausted, despairing, and mortally wounded-emerges the victor. But if love is not so strong, it be- comes a struggle between people who think themselves deceived; it comes to insults, crude intrusions of reality, incredible humiliations intended to make up for your having been the simpleton. . . . " He had experienced this stormy weather oflove often enough to be able to describe it now quite comfortably.
But Agathe put an end to this. "Ifyou don't mind, I'd like to point out that these marital and extramarital affairs of honor are for the most part much overrated! " she objected, and again tried to find a comfortable position.
"All love is overrated! The madman who in his derangement stabs with a knife and runs it through an innocent person who just happens to be standing where his hallucination is-in love he's normal! " Ul- rich declared, and laughed.
LOVING IS NOT SIMPLE
A comfortable position and lackadaisical sunshine, which caresses without being importunate, facilitated these conversations. They were mostly conducted between two deck chairs that had been not so much moved into the protection and shade of the house as into the shaded light coming from the garden, its freedom modulated by the morning walls. One should not, of course, assume that the chairs were standing there because brother and sister-stimulated by the sterility of their relationship, which in the ordinary sense was simply present but in a higher ~ensewas perhaps threatening-might have had the intention of exchanging their opinions concerning the de- ceptive nature oflove in Schopenhauerian-Hindu fashion, and of de- fending themselves against the insane seductive workings of its drive to procreation by intellectually dismembering them; what dictated the choice of the half-shadowed, the protective, and the curiously withdrawn had a simpler explanation. The subject matter of the con- versation was itself so constituted that in the infinite experience through which the notion of love first emerges distinctly, the most various associative pathways came to light, leading from one question to the next. Thus the two questions of how one loves the neighbor one does not know, and how one loves oneself, whom one knows even less, directed their curiosity to the question encompassing both: namely, how one loves at all; or, put differently, what love "really" is. At first glance this might seem rather precocious, and also an all-too- judicious question for a couple in love; but it gains in mental confu- sion as soon as one extends it to include millions of loving couples and their variety.
These millions differ not only individually (which is their pride) but also according to their ways of acting, their object, and their rela- tionship. There are times when one cannot speak of loving couples at all but can still speak of love, and other times, when one can talk of loving couples but not of love, in which case things proceed in rather
1317
1318 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
more ordinary fashion. All in all, the word embraces as many contra- dictions as Sunday in a small country town, where the farm boys go to mass at ten in the morning, visit the brothel in a side street at eleven, and enter the tavern on the main square at noon to eat and drink. Is there any sense in hying to investigate such a word all the way around? But in using it one is acting unconsciously, as if despite all the differences there were some inherent common quality! Whether you love a walking stick or honor is six of one and half a dozen of the other, and it would not occur to anybody to name these things in the same breath if one weren't accustomed to so doing every day. Other kinds of games about things that are different and yet one and the same can be addressed with: loving the bottle, loving tobacco, and loving even worse poisons. Spinach and outdoor exercise. Sports or the mind. Truth. Wife, child, dog. Those only added to the list who spoke about: God. Beauty, Fatherland, and money. Nature, friend, profession, and life. Freedom. Success, power, justice, or simply vir- tue. One loves all these things; in short, there are almost as many things associated with love as there are ways of striving and speak- ing. But what are the distinctions, and what do these loves have in common?
It might be useful to think of the word "fork. " There are eating forks, manure forks, tree-branch forks, gun forks, road forks, and other forks, and what they all have in common is the shaping charac- teristic of "forkness. " This is the decisive experience, what is forked, the gestalt of the fork, in the most disparate things that are called by that name. Ifyou proceed from these things, it turns out that they all belong to the same category; if you proceed from the initial impres- sion offorkness, it turns out that it is filled out and complemented by the impressions ofthe various specific forks. The common element is therefore a form or gestalt, and the differentiation lies first in the variety of forms it can assume, but then also in the objects having such a form, their purpose, and such things. But while every fork can be directly compared with every other, and is present to the senses, even if only in the form of a chalk line, or mentally, this is not the case with the various shapes of love; and the entire usefulness of the example is limited to the question ofwhether here, too, correspond- ing to the forkness of forks, there is in all cases a decisive experience, a loveness, a lovebeing, and a lovekind. But love is not an object of
From the Posthumous Papers · 1319
sensory understanding that is to be grasped with a glance, or even with an emotion, but a moral event, in the way that premeditated murder, justice, or scorn is; and this means among other things that a multiply branching and variously supported chain of comparisons is possible amongvarious examples ofit, the more distant ofwhich can be quite dissimilar to each other, indeed distinct from each other to the point of being opposite, and yet be connected through an associ- ation that echoes from one link to the next. Acting from love can thus go as far as hate; and yet the cause is not the much-invoked "am- bivalence," the dichotomy of emotions, but precisely the full totality of life.
Nevertheless, such a word might also have preceded the develop- ing continuation of the conversation. For forks and other such inno- cent aids aside, sophisticated conversation knows nowadays how to handle the essence and nature of love without faltering, and yet to express itself as grippingly as if this kernel were concealed in all the various appearances of love the way forkness is contained in the ma- nure fork or the salad fork. This leads one to say-and Ulrich and Agathe, too, could have been seduced into this by the general cus- tom-that the important thing in every kind oflove is libido, or to say that it is eros. These two words do not have the same history, yet they are comparable, especially in the contemporary view. For when psy- choanalysis (because an age that nowhere goes in for intellectual or spiritual depth is riveted to hear that it has a depth psychology) began to become an everyday philosophy and interrupted the middle classes' lack of adventure, everything in sight was called libido, so that in the end one could as little say what this key and skeleton-key idea was not as what it was. And much the same is true of eros, except that those who, with the greatest conviction, reduce all physical and spiritual worldly bonds to eros have regarded their eros the same way from the very beginning. It would be futile to translate libido as drive or desire, specifically sexual or presexual drive or desire, or to trans- late eros, on the other hand, as spiritual, indeed suprasensory, ten- derness; you would then have to add a specialized historical treatise. One's boredom with this makes ignorance a pleasure. But this is what determined in advance that the conversation conducted be- tween two deck chairs did not take the direction indicated but found attraction and refreshment instead in the primitive and insufficient
1320 ·THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
process ofsimply piling up as many examples as possible ofwhat was called love and putting them side by side as in a game: indeed, to behave as ingenuously as possible and not despise even the least judi- cious examples.
Comfortably chatting, they shared whatever examples occurred to them, and how they occurred to them, whether according to the emotion, according to the object it was directed at, or according to the action in which it expressed itself. But it was also an advantage first to take the procedure in hand and consider whether it merited the name oflove in real or metaphorical terms, and to what extent. In this fashion many kinds of material from different areas were brought together.
But spontaneously, the first thing they talked about was emotion; for the entire nature oflove appears to be a process offeeling. All ~e more surprising is the response that emotion is the least part oflove. For the completely inexperienced, it would be like sugar and tooth- ache; not quite as sweet, and not quite as painful, and as restless as cattle plagued by horseflies. This comparison might not seem a mas- terpiece to anyone who is himself tormented by love; and yet the usual description is really not that much different: being tom by doubts and anxieties, pain and longing, and vague desires! Since olden times it seems that this description has not been able to specify the condition any more precisely. But this lack of emotional specific- ity is not characteristic only of love. Whether one is happy or sad is also not something one experiences as irrevocably and straightfor- wardly as one distinguishes smooth from rough, nor can other emo- tions be recognized any better purely by feeling or even touching them. For that reason an observation was appropriate at this point that they might have fleshed out as it deserved, on the unequal dis- position and shaping of emotions. This was the term that Ulrich set out as its premise; he might also have said disposition, shaping, and consolidation.
For he introduced it with the natural experience that every emo- tion involves a convincing certainty of itself that is obviously part of its nucleus; and he added that it must also be assumed, on equally general grounds, that the disparity of emotions began no less with this nucleus. You can hear this in his examples. Love for a friend has a different origin and different traits from love for, a girl; love for a
From the Posthumous Papers · 1 3 2 1
completely faded woman different ones from love for a saintly, re- served woman; and emotions such as (to remain with love) love, ven- eration, prurience, bondage, or the kinds of love and the kinds of antipathy that diverge even further from one another are already dif- ferent in their very roots. If one allows both assumptions, then all emotions, from beginning to end, would have to be as solid and transparent as crystals. And yet no emotion is unmistakably what it appears to be, and neither self-observation nor the actions to which it gives rise provide any assurance about it. This distinction between the self-assurance and the uncertainty of emotions is surely not tri- fling. But if one observes the origin of the emotion in the context of its physiological as well as its social causes, this difference becomes quite natural. These causes awaken in general terms, as one might say, merely the kind of emotion, without determining it in detail; for corresponding to every drive and every external situation that sets it in motion is a whole bundle of emotions that might satisfy them. And whatever of this is initially present can be called the nucleus of the emotion that is still between being and nonbeing. If one wanted to describe this nucleus, however it might be constituted, one could not come up with anything more apt than that it is something that in the course of its development, and independently of a great deal that may or may not be relevant, will develop into the emotion it was in- tended to become. Thus every emotion has, besides its initial disposi- tion, a destiny as well; and therefore, since what it later develops into is highly dependent on accruing conditions, there is no emotion that would unerringly be itself from the very beginning; indeed, there is perhaps not even one that would indisputably and purely be an emotion. Put another way, it follows from this working together of disposition and shaping that in the field of the emotions what predominates are not their pure occurrence and its unequivocal ful- fillment, but their progressive approximation and approximate fulfill- ment. Something similar is also true of everything that requires emotion in order to be understood.
This was the end ofthe observation adduced by Ulrich, which con- tained approximately these explanations in this sequence. Hardly less brief and exaggerated than the assertion that emotion was the smallest part oflove, it could also be said that because it was an emo- tion, it was not to be recognized by emotion. This, moreover, shed
1322 · THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES
some light on the question ofwhy he had called love a moral experi- ence. The three chief term~sposition, shaping, and consolida- tion-were, however, the main cruxes connecting the ordered understanding of the phenomenon of emotions: at least according to a particular fundamental view, to which Ulrich not unwillingly turned whenever he had need of such an explanation. But at this stage, because working this out properly had made greater and more profound claims than he was willing to take upon himself, claims that led into the didactic sphere, he broke offwhat had been begun.
The continuation reached out in two directions. According to the program of the conversation, it ought now to have been the turns of the object and the action of love to be discussed, in order to deter- mine what it was in them that gave rise to their highly dissimilar man- ifestations and to discover what, ultimately, love "really" is. This was why they had talked about the involvement of actions at the very be- ginning of the emotion in determining that emotion, which should be all the more repeatable in regard to what happened to it later. But Agathe asked an additional question: it might have been possible- and she had reasons, ifnot for distrust, at least to be afraid ofit-that the explanation her brother had selected was really valid only for a weak emotion, or for an experience that wanted to have nothing to do with strong ones.
Ulrich replied: "Not in the least! It is precisely when it is at its strongest that an emotion is most secure. In the greatest panic, one is paralyzed or screams instead of fleeing or defending oneself. In the greatest happiness there is often a peculiar pain. Great eagerness, too, 'can only harm,' as one says. And in general it can be maintained that at the highest pitch of feeling the emotions fade and disappear as in a dazzling light. It may be that the entire world of emotions that we know is designed for only a middling kind oflife and ceases at the highest stages, just as it does not begin at the lowest. " An indirect part of this, too, is what you experience when you observe your feel- ings, especially when you examine them closely: they become indis- tinct and are hard to distinguish. But what they lose in clarity of strength they need to gain, at least to some degree, through clarity of attentiveness, and they don't do even that. . . . This was Ulrich's reply, and this obliteration ofthe emotion juxtaposed in self-observa- tion and in its ultimate arousal was not accidental. For in both condi-
From the Posthumous Papers · 1323
tions action is excluded or disturbed; and because the connection be- tween feeling and acting is so close that many consider them a unit, it is not without significance that the two examples are complementary.
But what he avoided saying was precisely what they both knew about it from their own experience, that in actuality a condition of mental effacement and physical helplessness can be combined with the highest stage ofthe emotion oflove. This made him tum the con- versation with some violence away from the significance that acting has for feeling, apparently with the intention of again bringing up the division of love according to objects. At first glance, this rather whim- sical possibility also seemed better suited to bringing order to ambi- guity. For if, to begin with an example, it is blasphemy to label love of God with the same word as love of fishing, this doubtless lies in the differences between the objects this love is aimed at; and the signifi- cance of the object can likewise be measured by other examples. What makes the enormous difference in this relationship of loving something is therefore not so much the love as rather the something. Thus there are objects that make love rich and happy; others that make it poor and sickly, as if it were due entirely to them. There are objects that must requite the love if it is to develop all its power and character, and there are others in which any similar demand would be meaningless from the outset. This decisively separates the con- nection to living beings from the connection to inanimate things; but, even inanimate, the object is the proper adversary of love, and its qualities influence those of love.
The more disproportionate in value this adversary is, the more dis- torted, not to say passionately twisted, love itself becomes. "Com- pare," Ulrich admonished, "the healthy love of young people for each other with the ridiculously exaggerated love of the lonely per- son for a dog, cat, or dickeybird. Observe the passion between man and wife fade away, or become a nuisance like a rejected beggar, ifit is not requited, or not fully requited. Don't forget, either, that in un- equal associations, such as those between parents and children, or masters and servants, between a man and the object of his ambition or his vice, the relationship of requited love is the most uncertain, and without exception the fatal element. Wherever the governing natural exchange between the condition of love and its adversary is imperfect, love degenerates like unhealthy tissue! " . . . This idea
1324 · THE MAN WITH 0 U T QUALITIES
seemed to have something special that attracted him. Ulrich would have expounded on it at length and with numerous examples, but while he was still thinking these over, something unanticipated, which quickened his intended line of thought with expectation like a pleasant fragrance coming across fields, appeared to direct his reflec- tions almost inadvertently toward what in painting is called still life or, according to the contrary but just as fitting procedure of a foreign language, nature morte. "It is somehow ridiculous for a person to prize a well-painted lobster," Ulrich continued without transition, "highly polished grapes, and a hare strung up by the legs, always with a pheasant nearby; for human appetite is ridiculous, and painted ap- petite is even more ridiculous than natural appetite. " They both had the feeling that this association reached back in more profound ways than were evident, and belonged to the continuation of what they had omitted to say about themselves.
For in real still lifes-objects, animals, plants, landscapes, and human bodies conjured up within the sphere of art-something other than what they depict comes out: namely, the mysterious, demoniacal quality of painted life. There are famous pictures of this kind, so both knew what they were talking about; it would, however, be better to speak not of specific pictures but of a kind of picture, which, moreover, does not attract imitators but arises without rules from a flourish of creative activity. Agathe wanted to know how this could be recognized. Ulrich gave a sign refusing to indicate any definitive trait, but said slowly, smiling and without hesitation: "The exciting, vague, infinite echo! "
And Agathe understood him. Somehow one ·has the feeling of being on a beach. Small insects hum. The air bears a hundred meadow scents. Thoughts and feelings stroll busily hand in hand. But before one's eyes lies the unanswering desert of the sea, and what is important on the shore loses itself in the monotonous motion of the endless view. She was thinking how all true stilllifes can arouse this happy, insatiable sadness. The longer you look at them, the clearer it becomes that the things they depict seem to stand on the colorful shore of life, their eyes filled with monstrous things, their tongues paralyzed.
Ulrich responded with another paraphrase. "All still lifes really
From the Posthumous Papers · 1325
paint the world of the sixth day of creation, when God and the world were still by themselves, with no people! " And to his sister's ques- tioning smile he said: "So what they arouse in people would probably be jealousy, secret inquisitiveness, and grief! "
That was almost an aper~u, and not a bad one; he noted it with displeasure, for he was not fond of these ideas machined like bullets and hastily gilded. But he did nothing to correct it, nor did he ask his sister to do so. For the strange resemblance to their own life was an obstacle that kept both of them from adequately expressing them- selves about the uncanny art of the still life or nature morte.
This resemblance played a great role in their lives. Without it being necessary to repeat in detail something reaching back to the shared memories ofchildhood that had been reawakened at their re- union and since then had given a strange cast to all their experiences and most of their conversations, it cannot be passed over in silence that the anesthetized trace of the still life was always to be felt in it. Spontaneously, therefore, and without accepting anything specific that might have guided them, they were led to turn their curiosity toward everything that might be akin to the nature of the still life; and something like the following exchange of words resulted, charg- ing the conversation once more like a flywheel and giving it new energy:
Having to beg for something before an imperturbable counte- nance that grants no response drives a person into a frenzy of de- spair, attack, or worthlessness. On the other hand, it is equally unnerving, but unspeakably beautiful, to kneel before an immovable countenance from which life was extinguished a few hours before, leaving behind an aura like a sunset.
This second example is even a commonplace of the emotions, if ever anything could be said to be! The world speaks of the consecra- tion and dignity of death; the poetic theme of the beloved on his bier has existed for hundreds, if not thousands of years; there is a whole body of related, especially lyric, poetry of death. This obviously has something adolescent about it. Who imagines that death bestows upon him the noblest of beloveds for his very own? The person who lacks the courage or the possibility of having a living one!
A short line leads from this poetic immaturity to the horrors of
1326 · THE MAN WITH0UT QUALITIES
conjuring up spirits and the dead; a second line leads to the abomina- tion of actual necrophilia; perhaps a third to the pathological oppo- sites of exhibitionism and coercion by violence.
These comparisons may be strange, and in part they are extremely unappetizing. But if one does not allow oneself to be deterred but considers them from, as it were, a medical-psychological viewpoint, there is one element they all have in common: an impossibility, an inability, an absence of natural courage or the courage for a natural life.
They also supply the truth-should one already be embarked on daring comparisons-that silence, fainting, and every kind of incom- pleteness in the adversary is connected with the effect of mental exhaustion.
What is especially repeated in this way, as was mentioned before, is that an adversary who is not on the same level distorts love; it is only necessary to add that it is not infrequently a distorted attitude of the emotion that bids it make a choice at all. And inversely, it would be the responding, living, acting partner who determines the emo- tions and keeps them in order, without which they degenerate into shadowboxing.
But isn't the strange charm of the still life shadowboxing too? In- deed, almost an ethereal necrophilia?
And yet there is also a similar shadowboxing in the glances of happy lovers as an expression oftheir highest feelings. They look into each other's eyes, can't tear themselves away, and pine in an infinite emotion that stretches like rubber!
This was more or less how the exchange of words had begun, but at this point its thread was pretty much left hanging, and for quite a while before it was picked up again. For they had both really looked at each other, and this had caused them to lapse into silence.
But ifan observation is called for to explain this-and ifit is neces- sary to justify such conversations once again and express their sense-perhaps this much could be said, which at this moment Ul- rich understandably left as an unspoken idea: that loving was by no means as simple as nature would have us believe by bestowing on every bungler among her creatures the necessary tools.
BREATHS OF A SUMMER DAY
The sun, meanwhile, had risen higher; they had abandoned the chairs like stranded boats in the shallow shade near the house and were lying on a lawn in the garden, beneath the full depth of the summer day. They had been like this for quite some time, and al- though the circumstances had changed, this change hardly entered their consciousness. Not even the cessation of the conversation had accomplished this; it was left hanging, without a trace of a rift.
A noiseless, streaming snowfall of lusterless blossoms, emanating from a group of trees whose flowering was done, hovered through the sunshine, and the breath that bore it was so gentle that not a leaf stirred. It cast no shadow on the green of the lawn, but this green seemed to darken from within like an eye. Extravagantly leaved by the young summer, the tender trees and bushes standing at the sides or forming the backdrop gave the impression of being amazed spec- tators who, surprised and spellbound in their gay attire, were partici- pating in this funeral procession and celebration of nature. Spring and fall, speech and nature's silence, and the magic of life and death too, mingled in this picture; hearts seemed to stop, removed from their breasts to join the silent procession through the air. "My heart was taken from out my breast," a mystic had said: Agathe remem- bered it.
She knew, too, that she herself had read this saying to Ulrich from one of his books.
That had happened here in the garden, not far from the place where they were now. The recollection took shape. Other maxims too that she had recalled to his mind occurred to her: "Are you it, or are you not it? I know not where I am; nor do I wish to know! " "I have transcended all my abilities but for the dark power! I am in love, and know not in whom! My heart is full oflove and empty oflove at the same time! " Thus echoed in her again the laments of the mystics, into whose hearts God had penetrated as deeply as a thorn that no
1327
1328 • THE MAN WITH0 UT QUALITIES
fingertips can grasp. She had read many such holy laments aloud to Ulrich at that time. Perhaps their rendering now was not exact: memory behaves rather dictatorially with what it wishes to hear; but she understood what was meant, and made a resolve. As it now ap- peared at this moment of flowery procession, the garden had also once looked mysteriously abandoned and animated at the very hour when the mystical confessions Ulrich had in his library had fallen into her hands. Time stood still, a thousand years weighed as lightly as the opening and closing of an eye; she had attained the Millen- nium: perhaps God was even allowing his presence to be felt. And while she felt these things one after the other-although time was not supposed to exist anymore-and while her brother, so that she should not suffer anxiety during this dream, was beside her, although space did not seem to exist any longer either: despite these contra- dictions, the world seemed filled with transfiguration in all its parts.
What she had experienced since could not strike her as other than conversationally temperate by comparison with what had gone before; but what an expansion and reinforcement it gave to these later things as well, although it had lost the near-body-heat warmth of the immediacy of the first inspiration! Under these circumstances Agathe decided to approach with deliberation the delight that had formerly, in an almost dreamlike way, befallen her in this garden. She did not know why she associated it with the name of the Millen- nium. It was a word bright with feeling and almost as palpable as an object, yet it remained opaque to the understanding. That was why she could regard the idea as ifthe Millennium could come to pass at any moment. It is also called the Empire of Love: Agathe knew that too; but only then did it occur to her that both names had been handed down since biblical times and signified the kingdom of God on earth, whose imminent arrival they indicated in a completely real sense. Moreover, Ulrich too, without on that account believing in the Scriptures, sometimes employed these words as casually as his sister, and so she was not at all surprised that she seemed to know exactly how one should behave in the Millennium. ''You must keep quite still," her inspiration told her. ''You cannot leave room for any kind of desire; not even the desire to question. You must also shed the judi- ciousness with which you perform tasks. You must deprive the mind of all tools and not allow it to be used as a tool. Knowledge is to be
From the Posthumous Papers · 1329
discarded by the mind, and willing: you must cast off reality and the longing to turn to it. You must keep to yourself until head, heart, and limbs are nothing but silence. But if, in this way, you attain the high- est selflessness, then finally outer and inner will touch each other as if a wedge that had split the world had popped out! "
Perhaps this had not been premeditated in any clear way. But it seemed to her that if firmly willed, it must be attainable; and she pulled herself together as if she were trying to feign death. But it quickly proved as impossible to completely silence the impulses of thought, senses, and will as it had been in childhood not to commit any sins between confession and communion, and after a few efforts she completely abandoned the attempt. In the process, she discov- ered that she was only superficially holding fast to her purpose, and that her attention had long since slipped away; at the moment, it was occupied with a quite remote problem, a little monster of disaffec- tion.